Archives for
July 2009

Ever bought a book from Barnes and Noble, then turned around to find it missing from your bookshelf and replaced with a voucher? Bizarre though it may seem, that's exactly what's happened to hundreds of owners of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm ...

Amazon has responded to today's Kindle book deletions story in an emailed statement, explaining the publisher did not have the rights to distribute the books, but adding that they won't handle the situation the same way if it happens again. The state...

A Canadian privacy commission report released on Thursday says that Facebook breaches privacy laws there. The report, outlined by Canadian Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart at a press conference in Ottawa, criticizes the fact that Facebook retai...

Thanks to this week’s advertisers and partners for enabling us to bring you the latest social media news and resources. We're particularly inspired by those brands that are engaging with our readers as part of our Twitter Brand Sponsors program: Mash...

Developers and users rely on the Twitter API (Application Programming Interface) to connect the social tool to 3rd party apps like TweetDeck and Seesmic. Thus, when there are changes, people notice -especially developers. This morning, there's been s...

Social media and crowdsourcing are like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich: they're just things that go well together. Social media's wide reach makes it easier than ever to poll current customers and get input on potential customers on what feature ...

This week, in the U.S. District Court of Eastern Missouri, Gregory McKenna filed a lengthy lawsuit against Apple, the St. Louis Police Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, an auto repair shop, and others. The su...

Hollywood is having a pretty good summer. The latest Harry Potter flick will be the 16th $100 million earner of 2009, and the Transformers sequel has already made over $350 million at the US box office -- good for a spot in the top 15 highest grossin...

Music is one of the best ways to express your love for something. It doesn't matter whether it's a girl or your favorite food - you really can sing about almost anything. And at this point, I'm pretty sure you all know how fanatically in love some pe...

The social music revolution, spanning from the days of Napster to the prevalence of streaming music, has brought us applications ranging from iTunes to Last.fm, providing us with better ways to access our favorite music cheaper (and just as important...

Social media was all over the map this week, but there was one theme that ran through many of this week's stories: security. From Twitter's meltdown to a gaping vulnerability Firefox 3.5, users saw the importance of security first-hand. Security's al...

UPDATE: For the latest on this story, see Confirmed: Digg Just Hijacked Your Twitter Links -- The social news site Digg found itself criticized earlier this year after the release of the DiggBar and Digg short URLs, which some said "stole" traffic an...

Forty years ago, on July 20th, 1969, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong became the first human beings to set foot on the moon. The Apollo Program, though, was a decade-long project involving millions of dollars, thousands of scientists, and constant comp...

Earlier today we mentioned that Digg.com appears to have changed the behavior of its short URLs so they no longer go to the source of the story for logged-out users: instead they direct visitors to a landing page on Digg.com. The change has many nega...

iPhone apps can find just about anything. They can help you find a job, locate your friends, or just pinpoint a gas station. But a new app is promising to find you something far more controversial: marijuana. Apple has approved a new $2.99 iPhone app...

We all know that the still-popular but amazingly annoying art of the Rickroll jumped shark a while ago, but we simply couldn't pass up a new remix of "Never Gonna Give You Up" that the Interwebs delivered to us. The music video remix, created by DJ M...

It's a brand new week, which means it's time for Mashable’s guide to upcoming social media and web events, parties, and conferences. For more upcoming event listings, check out Mashable's Events section. Is your event not on this list? Contact us and...

comScore has a report on the state of social networking in the UK, showing that social networking is a mainstream activity among all age groups, and the second online activity when it comes to time spent, behind instant messaging. Simply put: everyon...

David Spark (@dspark) is the founder of Spark Media Solutions, specialists in building industry voice through storytelling and social media. He blogs at The Spark Minute and can be seen and heard regularly on Cranky Geeks, KQED, and ABC Radio. Wouldn...

Have you noticed how often Twitter gets mentioned on the news, TV shows, in the movies, in newspapers? Well, all that buzz can be converted into cold hard cash, and if you look at it that way, Twitter is already filthy rich. News monitoring service V...

As a part of our charitable campaign, the Summer of Social Good, we've focused on how individuals and organizations can use social media to create positive social change. This week, we're focusing on the environment in particular and want to hear fro...

Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing, Google has introduced a new feature in Google Earth, adding Earth's most faithful follower to the popular geo application. Google has been diligently adding data to Google Earth, expandi...

Politicians have been taking to social media of late, from tweeting governators to YouTube Presidents. But for the thousands of staffers that work on Capitol Hill for members of Congress, social media is about a lot more than PR – they actually need ...

When Google reported its earnings last week, the company made a point to say that YouTube was on track to become a “profitable business.” Today, YouTube seems intent on driving home the issue, taking to their business blog in a post called “myth bust...

How do you know which social sites are most popular? Aside from looking at the raw traffic numbers, a good indicator is data about which sites are seeing the most content shared on them. Among the companies with access to tons of this type of data is...

Those of you who proudly tote around your BlackBerry and also call yourself a Mac person have been making do without the desktop software that your PC pals already have. You've had to live without iTunes playlist sync, quick access to your apps, back...

It hasn't even been a month since Firefox 3.5 was released to the masses, but Mozilla is already hard at work on Firefox 3.7. We gave you a sneak peek at what features are coming in 2010, but now we know what Firefox 3.7 may look like when it's relea...

Twitter is immensely useful as a utility for joining in the global conversation and sharing thoughts, opinions, information, and media. But for new users, there's also a fairly steep learning curve. For many people new to Twitter, the site doesn't im...

We know that spending on social advertising is rising, but because it's so new, the industry is still trying to figure out the most effective way to target these ads (thus why there's still a social media monetization problem). There's a new report t...

It may not be rocket science, but the city of Boston is putting their social media savvy to good use and turning to Facebook and Twitter to help them fight crime. Boston, already known for its tweeting police department, has decided to use social med...

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